nukie

Awesome work! I love everything about the new card, beautiful artwork, cool model and interesting abilities.  
Thank you for sharing some of the process. It shows how much work, thought and love you put in this project.
The upcomming PvP changes, especially the Happy Hour, sound interesting and might get me to play my very first PvP match 😉.
Have a nice day!
 

I actually didn't follow Burning Spears development process and didn't know it was ready for reveal.

And I must say I am absolutely amazed by both card's PvP design, as well as the artwork. I wouldn't think of introducing another XL counter to T2, but it's definitely a great idea,
Good job to everyone involved, and thanks for giving more practice targets for White Rangers.

I like to sum up this community update as "some love for PvP players". [check PvP league]

Can't wait for the patch to be released! 

Oh I remember sketching those concepts during first days of war... Sirens and withering of hope. Yet never give up till you breathe and do what you must! And you can see how it progressed, together we all will win.✊

Wow all of this news are so epic. Thanks for all the hard work and passion that is flowing into the Forge! Would nominate this for all Steam awards 😄

:hypetrain::hypetrain: :hypetrain::hypetrain::hypetrain::hypetrain: :hypetrain::hypetrain::hypetrain:

Greetings Skylords!
Every three weeks, we give an update on the things going on behind the scenes of Skylords Reborn. Welcome to another Community Update!

• Soon™

Last Community Update we revealed our upcoming new achievements and ever since we get daily questions when those (and the patch in general) will hit the live server. We are currently hard at work finalizing the upcoming patch, but aren't able to reveal a concrete release date just yet.
We expect to share more information with you regarding its release in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that. 
In the meantime, we are excited to reveal a new card today! 

• New Card Reveal: Burning Spears

Burning Spears is a new tier 2 fire unit, requiring two fire orbs. Upgrading the card reduces its power cost and increases its stats. The values noted here are for U3. It will be an Uncommon and won't have an affinity. 

Burning Spears is an S-sized squad unit that contains a weapon-switch similar to Ghost Spears. They will also have the Steadfast passive ability, meaning they can't be knocked back. 
 
Weapon Change
Type: mode-switch
Makes unit more effective against large units instead of extra-large ones. Lasts until deactivated.
 
Weapon Change
Type: mode-switch
Makes unit more effective against extra-large units instead of large ones. Lasts until deactivated.
 
Burning Lance / Scorching Injury (passive ability)
Enemies hit by Burning Spear's attacks will be set on fire and take additional damage that steadily increases the longer they burn. The burn deals 2 damage per second and stacks up to 25 times. Attacked units may only walk at walk speed for 15 seconds.
 
Design Goals
Burning Spears are designed as a new tool to increase deck building options in pure Fire. The faction currently has a limited pool of pure cards in PvP, leading to a very M-unit centric deck design with a limited amount of deck building options and balancing levers to change specific matchup behaviors.
The addition of Burning Spears will add a versatile small sized unit into the faction, that is supposed to help with some of the factions counter issues against L and XL units in T2, while demanding a deck slot investment in return. The passive ability enables very high backloaded damage potential to punish players that try to ignore them, whereas the slow and steadfast ability allow Burning Spears to stick to their priority targets while enabling further spell synergies with cards like Wildfire.
Please note: We are still testing the card. While we are generally happy about it and feel comfortable revealing it, numbers and effects might still change before release.
 
• Artwork Spotlight

Now that our art team has grown, we tried a different approach for our creation process. The card was already play tested, so we knew its effects and that it would use the Ghost Spears model, but there were no other hard restrictions for the art. 
Our artist Spirit Alpha worked together with Tweeto to explore some ideas, which resulted in multiple concept arts. They settled on a barbaric look. 


The next step was to visualize the design in-game, and make sure what we had in mind would actually be possible to implement, preventing a mismatch between art and model.

Once the theme, colors and general appearance were fleshed out, it was time to start working on the artwork. Different compositions were explored again.



 
Spirit Alpha then handed in this artwork. While we were generally happy with how this design turned out, there were still some things to be done. While the Deep One claw was a nice touch, we found it did make the artwork more cluttered and distracted the viewer's eye. With the help of Tweeto, adjustments were also made to the background, contrast and skin, left arm anatomy, right arm shape and the spear. 
 

After a couple of extra iterations (and lots of discussion about flames with our art critique), we finally settled on the current design. A big thanks to our artists Spirit Alpha and Tweeto for drawing the artwork, to Friendly Firefly for working on the ability icons and to our art critiques for their support and comments. 
As you can see, a ton of work went into this, and we haven't even showed you half of the iterations. 
We are very happy with how it turned out, and hope you like it as well!
 
• Upcoming PvP changes

While PvP has a very passionate community, the game mode currently has certain flaws that prevent players from getting into it. We hope to tackle these in our upcoming patch. Here are some of the changes we will implement:

Queue will drain the BFP reserve
PvP often enters a "Spiral of Death" when too few players are online. It takes too long to find a match, so players stop queuing, which results in it taking longer to find a match... We want to give players an incentive to wait in the ranked lobby for more than a few minutes, resulting in the lobby no longer being empty and the next person who wants to play finding an opponent quickly. If you queue for at least 5 minutes, even if you don't find an opponent, you will earn BFP as if you were ingame, meaning you get BFP not just for playing, but also while searching for matches. 

Hide Player Names
We have seen that some players tend to dodge certain high ranked players while playing ranked, not queuing up when they see higher skilled opponents in the lobby. To prevent this behavior, we will hide player names in the ranked lobby. To not impact casual play, we have separated the sparring and ranked lobbies, allowing you to still invite players into your lobby and make things like tournaments and Toggy's Fightclub still possible.

Hide Losses
Another reason that prevents players from queuing up is the fear of messing up their win/loss ratio, or even feeling shame to have their losses publicly shown on the ladder. It has been proven in other competitive games that showing losses results in demotivation and higher entry barriers. We hope this change encourages players to focus on what matters (playing the game and improving yourself) instead of stats that might not even represent your current skill level.

New Player Protection
To protect new players from facing top players when they are just getting started, we will prevent players with <102.000 base ELO from getting matched with players at >135.000 base ELO. 

Changes to Free PvP Decks
With upcoming balance adjustments and new cards, we will update our free PvP decks to compete with the new meta. Additionally, we have made changing these decks more flexible; resulting in no longer having to reset all the free PvP decks when we make these changes.
If we update one of the free PvP decks you have currently selected, you will now have the option to either swap to the new cards, or keep your current set up. We are currently planning to make the following changes:

Pure Nature:
+ Parasite
- Shrine of Memory

Fire/Nature
+ Twilight Minions (G)
- Ghost Spears

Pure Shadow
+ Executor
- Nightguard

Rebalanced 2vs2 Maps
While we mostly balance the game around 1vs1, we know players really enjoy 2vs2 as well. We are very happy with how our rebalanced 1vs1 maps turned out, and we want to give 2vs2 the same treatment. 

Changes include removal (or adjustments) of walls, wells, slight changes to the layout, and making certain area's immovable for flying units. This should result in a better play experience and more balanced maps. 

These maps will also have observer versions, meaning it will now be possible to host 2vs2 tournaments again! We also updated the minimaps to be accurate. 


PvP Happy Hours
A feature long in the works and finally nearing release is Happy Hours. Happy Hours are specific time periods where players will receive additional gold and BFP for playing PvP. 
We have noticed PvP is currently quite scattered, with a lot of players wanting to play, but going offline again when they can't find opponents. While rewarding to queue is one incentive to have players stay online longer when the lobbies are empty, we also want to help players find opponents in general. We hope that by clustering players together during certain time frames, players will have an easier time finding matches more frequently. 
Happy Hours will take place during the following times:
- 1vs1 happy hours: 7pm-9pm CET
- 2vs2 happy hours: 9pm-10pm CET
- 1vs1 happy hours: 4am-5am CET

These times were decided upon by going over our available data and keeping different time zones in mind where possible. During Happy Hours, there will be an in-game announcement and the icon on the world map will indicate Happy Hours are active. 

We hope to release all these features with our next patch, though Happy Hours is currently still in active development. We hope to finish it in time to be included as well. 

• Team Changes

We have a new teammember in Nukie, who has joined the team recently as a Global Moderator. Welcome, and thanks for your help!

• Open Positions Rework

We have made some changes to our open positions and spotlighted them in their own forum section. It is now easier than ever to see the current open positions, and we also added some extra information to each role, better showcasing what you will be doing. 

Skylords Reborn is always looking for motivated volunteers to help out the project. You can currently help out in multiple areas, ranging from artwork to development, map design and much more. 

Want to help out but don't want to join the staff? No problem! We also have positions like proofreader and map tester where you can more easily drop in and out, helping out when you have time. Lastly, we also have open-source projects and our Skylords Bounty (see below). Please take a look!

 
• Active Bounty

While we already have some nice contenders, our current Bounty to create a Spring Forge is still open. A Skylords Bounty is an open-source task for the community to create something needed in one of the departments of Skylords Reborn. If your entry gets chosen, you can win a great prize, and we will reward everyone who applies with a serious attempt with a participation reward as well. View more information on Active bounties.

• OPEN - Spring Forge Bounty
Spring Forge Bounty is an opportunity for the community to have full engagement with the next upcoming Forge. This allows everyone to submit a possible design for how they would like the Forge to look! The winning design will be rewarded with a Promo Razorleaf!
A tutorial video has been provided to assist and help the community take its first steps for doing so!

• Tournaments / Events

• NEW - Toggys Tome Tournament #4 17.05.22 
A midweek tournament held on Tuesday May 17th, at 18:30 CEST (Berlin time). The format will be Tome, meaning you will build your decks for this tournament out of a booster pool Toggy provide to you. Tome tournaments always result in crazy decks and cards you dont see very often, so be sure to join the action or watch the tournament on Twitch. The tournament will be played on the Testserver. More information and sign-up. 


• STREAM - Official 2p rPvE Contest#3 Last Resort - 25.05.2022 16:30 CEST
In this event, players were only allowed to use units, not spells or buildings. We will host a stream revealing the winners of this contest on Wednesday 25rd of May, 16:30 on our official twitch channel. 

• FINISHED - CCC #4
Kapo hosted another successful Crappy Community Contest© on the map Mo. Players were encouraged to play as few cards as possible to complete the map. As one of the first events to not focus on speed, this resulted in some interesting strategies. As with all CCC, the more players attend, the better the prizes are, in this case resulting in a free booster for the whole community. 
 
• FINISHED - Skylords Open 14
The Skylords Open returned with a blast! We saw some of the best players battle it out, with some match results that would surprise you. You can rewatch the matches here. 

• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizers Hiko and/or Metagross to have your event prizes sponsored by us. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you. 
 
• In Conclusion

And that's it for this Community Update, thanks for reading! 
As is tradition, this community update comes with a scratch code. 
The code will reward you with a mini-booster: FIRE-CARD-HYPE-TIME
The code is valid until June 4th, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
As always, we are open to feedback, so please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions or comments! 

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update #22

I improved my record for Insane God Solo- 8.30.4

New time for Treasure Fleet expert Dutchy: 14.49.00

New record for Sunbridge: 8:59.2 DieToPlay + Irysunna

Heavily depends on the map, some runs are more optimized than others, some maps have random elements while others have not, some maps have higher complexity (which usually means more inputs). Those are the 3 most important factors in rating how difficult it is to beat a time.
These are the all-time records for a reason and are the result of 100th of runs on these maps (incl. strategy development).
Like e.g. I would not want to try that GoL record, very highly optimized, endkill is highly randomized and high amount of inputs (though shortness of run and verry few random factors in setup lessen this factor to some extent)

Awesome!
So many well thought over changes in one update. Keep up the good work!
As being a Dragonkin myself, I love seeing my family grow 😄 

We dont have a concrete date yet. Since we all work on this in our free time, and there are a lot of moving parts, its hard to pinpoint a concrete release date and we prefer not to give false promises. However, we are currently finalizing the stuff we want to include in the next patch, so we are making progress. 

So SoonTM I suppose? 

Thanks for playing everyone who showed up. 

The people who didn't showed up had to be disqualified. Here is the Top 5

 

Are neutral cards allowed for new archivements? especialy for Promo Manawing?

To avoid some confusion, the achievements will all need to be done again to earn the rewards, previous progress is not counted for the new achievements. 

Yes, they will be available for everyone. Even if you have already completed all of the maps for example, you will be asked to do it again (for example for mana wing promo).

Recorded testing footage of Wasteland Terror attacking squads on walls.
09e23zGLg6Ok6WTiDyKsHXYFju77IjLYdmb7IawcCnh9KUfayNiiRMW6AdD0Aw1B.mp4

Hope this was well planned and tested - this fears me a bit atm 😄


Else: AWESOME! Can't await the patch!

Nice job once again team!

Pure frost into fire rpve seems to be more forgiving, especially vs bosses, Awesome!

The achievements specify that the deck must only contain cards from a certain color. As neutral cards are not nature/frost/shadow/fire/lost souls, they are not eligible for the achievement.

Greetings Skylords!
Every three weeks, we give an update on the things going on behind the scenes of Skylords Reborn. Welcome to another Community Update!
Before we dive in, please note there will be a Rookie Tournament today! More information in the event section below.


• Wasteland Terror

It has already been half a year since we first revealed the upcoming card Wasteland Terror. While originally planned to release alongside our Anniversary Patch, we underestimated the time it would take to create both a fitting in game look and its required visuals. 
However, after a lot of hard work, we have arrived at a place we are satisfied with. Wasteland Terror has become an awesome Bandit-take on the dragon model, and fires streams of sand that will lay waste to your enemies. We feel confident Wasteland Terror will make it into our upcoming content patch, and we hope you look forward to using it! 

View animation:

• New Achievements

With our next patch, we will add a couple of new achievements into the game. Those are aimed to both improve the new player experience, while also giving our more veteran players something to work towards. 
 
[ Infinitely Scaling Achievement ]
First off is a recurring achievement, slightly increasing the incentive to reforge your cards:
Reborn in Fire  [1 Mini-booster]
Reforge Cards (Unlocks every 20 reforges, scales infinitely)

[ Beginner Achievements ]
We found that for new players, the jump from the early game achievements to later game ones such as "complete all maps on advanced difficulty" was too steep. At the same time, the rate of card collection was too slow. To ease this transition, we have added a number of in-between-points in terms of achievements, which act as both more manageable goals to complete and more plentiful sources of early cards.

Just a Story  [1 Twilight booster]
Complete Viridya and Brannoc's story on standard difficulty or higher (Encounters, Siege of Hope, Defending Hope, Soultree, Crusade, Sunbridge, King of the Giants, Titans, Ascension)
The Most Dangerous Game [1 Bandits booster]
Complete Mo's story on standard difficulty or higher {Mo, Ocean, Oracle, Slave Master, Convoy, Blight, Raven's End, Empire)
A Debt Unpaid  [20,000 gold]
Complete the story related to the Treasure Fleet on advanced difficulty or higher. (Bad Harvest, Treasure Fleet, Mo, Blight, Slave Master, Convoy) 
A Mile in His Shoes  [2 Stonekin boosters]
Complete Rogan's story on advanced difficulty or higher (Encounters, Siege of Hope, Defending Hope, Crusade, King of the Giants, Titans, Dwarven Riddle, Guns of Lyr, Empire)
A Wrinkle in Time  [250 bfp]
Win the 4-player map Empire spawning at least 5 different Lost Souls cards from a deck containing only frost, shadow, and Lost Souls cards.
Godslayer  [250 bfp]
Win the 2-player maps Sunbridge and Insane God on any difficulty. 
Apprentice  [1 booster]
Win 20 randomly generated PvE matches of difficulty 5 or higher. 
 
[ Veteran PvE Achievements ]
These new achievements provide a smoother transition towards ''play all maps on expert'', while also adding some unique challenges into the game.

The Road Not Taken  [3 boosters]
Win 20 randomly generated PvE matches of difficulty 9 or higher.
Turn Back All Ye Who Enter Here  [6 boosters]
Win 20 randomly generated PvE matches of difficulty 10.
Nevermore  [2 Bandit boosters]
Complete Blight's story on expert difficulty (Blight, Raven's End, Slave Master, Ocean, and Oracle)
Make it Double  [2 Amii boosters]
Complete all 2-player maps on expert difficulty. (Crusade, Sunbridge, Nightmare Shard, Nightmare's End, The Insane God, Slave Master and Convoy)
Never Thought of Him  [100,000 gold]
Complete the story of Mo becoming the new king of the fire tribes on expert difficulty with all players in the map using decks containing only Fire cards.  (Mo, Ocean, Oracle, Slave Master, Convoy, and Raven's End)
The Long Journey Home  [2 Frost boosters]
Complete the story re-establishing the Kingdom of Lyr on expert difficulty using decks containing only frost cards. (Encounters with Twilight, Siege of Hope, Defending Hope, Bad Harvest, Dwarven Riddle, and Guns of Lyr)
Not Even My Final Form  [Rogan Kayle Card]
Win the 1-player map Encounters with Twilight on expert difficulty without using T3 or T4 cards.
Forest for the Tree  [Viridya Card]
Complete the 1-player map The Soultree on expert difficulty using only Nature cards from T1 and T2.
A City Strongly Compact  [Stronghold Card]
Win the 1-player map Defending Hope on expert difficulty with a deck containing only spell and building cards.
A Force of Nature   [Promo Mana Wing]
Complete all 1-player and 2-player scenarios on expert difficulty with all players in your team using decks containing only Nature cards.

Those who complete "A Force of Nature" will be rewarded with a Promo Mana Wing! This promo is unique to this achievement and will not be available from boosters, but it will be trade-able. We hope you look forward to the challenge!
Please note: these achievements are not yet on the live server! 

 
• Upcoming Balance Update rPvE Fire 

Fire was added as an enemy faction in rPvE in our Anniversary Patch. While we are currently working on adding Nature as the next faction to fight against, we have been keeping a close eye on the balance and player experience against Fire among all skill levels. With our next content patch, we will be making some changes to improve the experience. 


New Building: Flame Crystal
• Spawns in Lvl. 4 and Lvl. 5 camps*
• Will periodically remove debuffs and cc effects from allied units
Fire can be extremely strong, but due to its high attack and low defense, it is extra vulnerable to Crowd Control spells. We want to counter this weakness with a brand-new building, while at the same time making changes to some of its more oppressive tools. 
View animation:
Abaddon:
• Damage: Decreased

Brannoc:
• Fire Sphere damage reduced

Aspect of Summer
• No longer prevents Ice Shields from being applied

Fiend of Fire
• Flame Breath: damage reduced

Spitfire
• Range: Decreased
• Drastically reduce spawning in Lvl. 3 camps*

Volcano
• HP: Decreased
• Size: Decreased
• No longer spawns in Lvl. 3 camps*

Plus a lot of changes to smooth out difficulties below 6.
* Lvl 3 camps are usually right behind the T3/T4 camp; Lvl 4 camps are the row behind Lvl.3; Lvl. 5 is always the last row


• Tournaments / Events

• NEW - Official PvP Rookie Contest#2 Clashes of Swords - Today
The Rookie Tournament is happening today! It will be accessible for all beginning players who are interested in improving their skills or being more involved with the competitive side of the community. View more information and sign-up

• NEW - Official 2p rPvE Contest#3 Last Resort - UNTIL 30-04-2022
The rPvE event consists of teams of two going up against the map of the month on difficulty 2 to 6. They will be playing beside a set condition where they're not allowed to use spells or buildings but only units! View more information and sign-up

• ONGOING - The PvP League - Phase II
The league will consist of small groups (divisions) of about 8 players who will fight each other, one opponent per week. The season ends when everyone played everyone in the group, after which people will get promoted or demoted to match opponents of equal skills again. New players are encouraged to join as well! View more information and sign-up

• FINISHED - Official PvE Contest#5: They See Me Walkin', They Hatin'
Players had to complete Convoy on "Advanced Difficulty" while only using pure coloured decks, therefore limiting them from using mixed oriented cards! View more information and sign-up

• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizers Hiko and/or Metagross to have your event prizes sponsored by us. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you. 
 
• Active Bounties

A Skylords Bounty is an open-source task for the community to create something needed in one of the departments of Skylords Reborn. If your entry gets chosen, you can win a great prize, and we will reward everyone who applies with a serious attempt with a participation reward as well. A bounty is not a classic contest, and will run until the task is complete. We will give a heads-up when the entries are about to be closed (at least two weeks in advance). View more information on Active bounties.
 
• OPEN - Spring Forge Bounty
Spring Forge Bounty is an opportunity for the community to have full engagement with the next upcoming Forge. This allows everyone to submit a possible design for how they would like the Forge to look!
A tutorial has been provided to assist and help the community take its first steps for doing so!

• Team Changes

Welcome Friendly Firefly! He's our new 2D Artist! He will be aiming towards working on backgrounds as well as icons for the game and more!
Welcome LamonChan! He's one of our new Tool Developers. He will be aiming towards working on a variety of our tools to optimize the performance and experience for user interactions.
We are always seeking additional help towards the project. Please help yourself to our open positions and If you see anything of interest, then feel free to apply! 
 
• We Need Your Help

This section may come along various times, however we are doing it to visit or even revisit what's important to make this community and game prosper with more development and progression! Please feel free to take a look at our Open Positions to see where you can possibly help out!
 
• Open Position - Balance Developer
As a balance developer, you are responsible to implement design changes to in-game cards using our internal balancing tool. In other words, you are responsible to implement new cards and changes to existing cards. These implementation requests can come from balance updates and content patches from our Faction Designers, but also from the official Skylords Reborn map making team (for example, new bosses for a new map). An integral part of this role is learning our internal balancing tool, as that is the tool that allows us to perform all these changes. You are by no means required to have any programming experience. Read more and apply.
 
• Open Position - Video Editor
As a video editor, you are responsible for creating exciting video content for Skylords Reborn. This can range from short card reveal videos to exciting trailers and cutting up Twitch-stream content for highlight videos on our YouTube channel. If you have any experience with audio post-production, you can also help us out with the process of adding new voice-lines and sound effects into the game. Read more and apply.
 
• Open Position - Game Client Developer
As a game client developer, you are responsible to maintain and develop the game client. This mostly includes add new pre-game features (content outside of matches, so no game mechanics) through .pak files used by the game. You will be responsible to create and design in-game interfaces for new features, add networking support for new features that require it, solve bugs etc. using LUA, XML and little bit of Rust. BattleForge uses LUA and XML in their .pak files, which are loaded by the client. Communication with the server happens through a proxy written in Rust. Read more and apply.
 
• In Conclusion

And that's it for this Community Update, thanks for reading! 
As is tradition, this community update comes with a scratch code. 
The code will reward you with a mini-booster: LATE-APRL-EART-HDAY
The code is valid until 14th May 2022, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
As always, we are open to feedback, so please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions or comments! 

Archive
• Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)
• Overview Community Updates
• Community Update #21

Cant wait for the Patch.

ALL ABOARD THE HYPE TRAIN!

Hey powerspy, yes we're already working on a completely new and reworked version 1.0 of our Updater. We just stacked up the team by two more developers to help coding that new version. Most of the core features are already implemented and it's just a bit of finetuning and some more convenience features.

A little feature overview:
checking your client files for corruptions (which should solve or at least give a hint for problems) logging of the tasks the Updater is doing to be able to help in technical support when the Updater or the client has issues starting the MapEditor via the Updater and not by manually opening the game containing directory and execute the application being able to change game options before starting the game which should reduce game restarts being able to delete saved credentials without manually editing config files new UI and some more features (also under the hood ones) I hope this answers your question. Thanks for playing Skylords Reborn! 🙂